raping children for jesus

Ross Douthat Blames Child-Raping Catholic Priests On … Hippies!

Fresh from his groundbreaking theory about the lazy Jews (“Why didn’t Jews show any understanding of evil by making hobbit books during the Holocaust?”),New York Times creepy blogger Ross Douthat has stumbled upon yet another unique thought, this time about all the Catholic priests fucking little children forever. Could it be that somehow liberals are to blame for this, too, because heterosexual non-clergy adults perhaps had sex outside of marriage during the 1970s, the “Nixon Decade”?

Now, it is undisputed fact that adult male Catholic priests brutalize and rape the little boys they are trusted to teach about Jesus, and that this is happening almost any place where there are Catholic priests, and it’s been well-documented throughout the last century. (We say “almost” any place because in Africa, the Catholic priests seem to have a personal distaste for raping little boy children in the anus with their adult cocks — the style in most African churches is to brutally rape nuns.)

Honestly, is there a parent in the world that would leave their child with a goddamned priest today? The kid would be safer in a box of live, angry rattlesnakes.

“Just going to drop off our son at Catholic School, be back soon!”

“Oh, good. Our little boy hasn’t been held down and fucked up the ass by a nasty old drunk man since last week!”

Anyway, wow, who wants to bet how many times lil’ Ross got left with Father McBonerforboys? Because he sure wants to find someone other than, say, the evil motherfucking priests to blame.

Liberal Catholics, echoed by the secular press, insist that the whole problem can be traced to clerical celibacy. Conservatives blame the moral relativism that swept the church in the upheavals of the 1970s, when the worst abuses and cover-ups took place.

In reality, the scandal implicates left and right alike. The permissive sexual culture that prevailed everywhere, seminaries included, during the silly season of the ’70s deserves a share of the blame, as does that era’s overemphasis on therapy. (Again and again, bishops relied on psychiatrists rather than common sense in deciding how to handle abusive clerics.)

“In reality, the scandal implicates left and right alike”: but you gotta admit, nobody wanks as good as Ross.

rxaver

Whew! That’s a relief. I was an altar boy in the 60s, and NOT ONE SINGLE PRIEST FUCKED ME! I was beginning to believe it was because I wasn’t cute enough, but now I understand that Fr. McCreepy was saving it up for the next decade. Sorry about that, younger brother!

Ducksworthy

Very few rightwingtards succumb to the “liberal media” constant one the one hand on the other hand equivocation but Douchehat does offer this reasonable, and not nearly as abstract, alternative explanation: “Liberal Catholics might counter that the priesthood has always been disproportionately homosexual, and that the sexual revolution probably just encouraged psychologically healthy gay priests to give up on the church entirely, leaving behind a clerical population tilted toward repression, self-loathing and the dysfunctions of the closet.’ all of which misses the point that child molesters aren’t ghey, they’re sick fucks.

Lazy Media

Don’t those priest sex scandals go back to the ’40s? And before that, nobody would DARE question a priest’s right to fuck altar boys. The ’70s was just when they actually started reporting it and trying to make them stop, Douchehat.

MargeSimpsonsBlackFriend

Ross Douchehat has never seen a real vagina in his whole life, has he?

Jukesgrrl

If this dick believes “the worst abuses and cover-ups took place in the 1970s,” it’s only because he wasn’t alive in the 1950s. I was. I beg to differ.

rebellitor

Why does he have a job?

4tehlulz

So Ross, when did you stop fucking kids?

El Pinche

Douthat blames the hippies, but deep down inside he blames those super sexxy Go, Diego Go outfits the boys are wearing these days.

TGY

I blame God. He should apologize, obvs.

Lionel Hutz Esq.

Ross, Ross, Ross, it takes years to build up to Jonah Goldberg levels of bat-shit craziness.

You should stay with articles about why you can’t get it up when you are around women, and how that relates to seeing Jane Fonda in Barbarella as a child.

Edywin

Yes at Woodstock I remember all the young schoolboys getting fucked in the ass by, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Abbie Hoffman, and Sly and the Family Stone. Damn, wish I had of gone now. Piece boy!

El Pinche

[re=546095]MargeSimpsonsBlackFriend[/re]: Now, that’s not true.
He saw one vagina…after they snipped his umbilical cord, but that’s about it.

bitchincamaro

The sexties and the sementies. They were so evil.

Judas Peckerwood

I blame Chunky Reese Witherspoon!

SmutBoffin

Ross Douthat seems to have a good (if backward-facing and spiteful) imagination. I mean, how do you come up with the whole “everyone except the priests who isn’t also conservative* is responsible for all child rapes, everywhere” argument without a good one? He could be writing terrible FICTION instead of cluttering the minds of people who read his terrible NON-FICTION analysis of.. whatever it is that he analyses.

Fuck off and take your crap elsewhere, Douthat.

* I now he says “…the scandal implicates left and right alike…”, but come on, we know what he means.

chascates

And, so far as the Irish incidents, which occurred up to 50 years ago?

ManchuCandidate

Pope Rapey, fits.

Is there a pic where he doesn’t look like a grabby preverted (sic) uncle? No? I thought so.

Prommie

This has been the party line for some time now. The poor priests were infected by liberal sexual libertinism swirling through the air. This, you see, is why tolerance is intolerable, they are simply incapable of adhering to their faith and their moral teachings, these catholics, and the fundies, as well, so long as there is anyone else on earth who is out there sinning, the sinningness is contagious, and its a dire threat to them.

pdiddycornchips

“In reality” Ross is a CAT 5 hurricane of douchery but he would still be spinning around harmlessly in the middle of the cyberspace ocean if not for the f#cking NY Times who, in their infinite wisdom, decided a Nobel Prize winner from the left should be “balanced” on the Ed/Op page by a batshit crazy fratboy who I’m sure submits his work in Crayon.

chaste everywhere

[re=546103]rebellitor[/re]: And how do I get paid for being wrong about everything? Now that all the journalism jobs are taken, I mean.
[re=546109]TGY[/re]: God means never having to say you’re sorry.

Once again, Douthat nails an idea like a cute but slightly chubby chick at a college party. It takes an unusual degree of insight to attribute the cause of a problem that’s been going on since at least the 18th Century (cf. Voltaire’s Candide, wherein a Dominican friar tries to feel up our hero on a battlefield strewn with corpses) to something that happened two hundred years later. With that kind of moral clarity, Ross really ought to be out in front of his congressman’s office screaming about socilism.

wilbro

Yes, consenting cheaters and priests banging children — what’s the difference when seen through the prism of right-left blame?

Vatican Ii: the Woodstock of homoeratocatholofacism.

Extemporanus

Ross is talking about taking the penance of one priest and putting it in the rectory of another priest and wriggling it around in sacraments.

Ninong

[re=546096]Jukesgrrl[/re]: In the 1950’s, a priest accused of “sexual midconduct” would be transferred to another diocese, often to teach at another high school for boys! And there would be no mention of the reason for the transfer because all investigations into “sexual misconduct” were conducted in secret as directed by the Vatican. I know of one such case from personal experience.

[re=546093]Ducksworthy[/re]: While this is true, I think it’s also fair to argue that if your friends and family told you, during your phase of sexual self-discovery, that, gay or straight, your sexuality happened to be an abomination against nature, and the only place for you in society was a career path that hinged on both complete celebacy and a position of authority in the community, you’ve basically constructed a catastrophe waiting to happen.

It’s frankly not that gheys are any more likely to molest children, it’s that people who are told that any likely sexual expression of theirs is basically the same, equally bad, sin, and are then put in a position of authority over the relatively powerless are more likely to molest children, and it just so happens that this happens an awful lot to ghey Catholic men.

Granted, though, I’d be willing to bet that specific bit of nuance is lost on Douchehat.

Dave J.

[re=546092]rxaver[/re]: Wasn’t this an episode of “Always Sunny in Philadelphia,” where Dennis (or Mac?) gets pissed off that his old teacher didn’t find him hot enough to molest?

drrty martini

I was under the impression that, in reality, this implicated the leadership of the Catholic church, and the governments that have been lazy in investigating and enforcing child rape laws. I was wrong! Hippies! They smoke pot!!!

JMP

Yes, it was all the fault of those sexing hippies and disco dancers; just like it’s all chunky Reese Witherspoon’s fault that Douthat is such a douche.

To be fair, his assertion that the scandal is due to the sexual revolution is correct in a certain way, since along with the rise of feminism it worked to alleviate the victim-blaming in rape cases, which lead to the priests’ sexual assaults being reported, the public finding out about the epidemic, and the ensuing scandal and revulsion at the Catholic Church’s crimes. That’s not the way he meant it, though.

Extemporanus

[re=546128]Scarab[/re]: I blame Judas Priest.

SmutBoffin

[re=546131]SayItWithWookies[/re]: “…Douthat nails an idea like a cute but slightly chubby chick at a college party.”

Sure the hippes filled the priests in on the joys ass raping little boys. Father Fondle and Father McPheely didn’t come to this conclusion on their own.

You know Ross last I checked people really like to screw and to have a whole group of guys who can’t get married and at least get laid quarterly, the need for sex will show up in weird ways. And why can’t these guys get married, to be Christ like is the church’s claim, but some very easy research shows it was the church who was afraid the spouse would have a claim on property that belonged to the church.

Beowoof

[re=546146]SmutBoffin[/re]: I always liked the slightly chubby ones. They always seemed be more adventerous and fun to me. And lets not leave out curves, love the curves.

V572625694

Hard to recall anyone in the Sixties or Seventies saying raping kids was okay. Hitch is right on this one: like “enhanced interrogation techniques,” “child abuse” is a euphemism. The good fathers were hoisting up their cassocks and butt-fucking little boys because, you know…it doesn’t really count if it’s with another dude. Or, as they say in prison, it’s not gay if you don’t look down.

Rush

If an alterboy was not chosen to be fucked by a priest, does that mean the boy was “Passed Over”?

sanantonerose

Idaknow. Sumthin tells me that priests done been rape-y for a hellalot longer than the sexual liberation of the 70s til present time.

[re=546150]Beowoof[/re]: It’s true. We’re not as worried about how our body *looks* – we just care about how it *feels.*

Bearbloke

[re=546153]sanantonerose[/re]: Even the Renaissance artists knew that Priests love tight young boys – look at all the Vatican art!

Monsieur Grumpe

Is it me or is this guy just not funny? He’s supposed to be funny right? He’s kind of like Carrot Top only different right? I don’t get it. Needs more slapstick or something.

Prommie

Hey now, Ya’ll, one point of accuracy. The Church was going to cover up and protect the ass-rapers no matter what, but during the 70s, the church did find it useful to hide behind a psychological profession that had different rules than today about reporting things.

If douchetard wants to be accurate, he could focus this argument a lot more narrowly on the psychological-professional viewpoint, that there is no sin, only dysfunction, no crime, only mental abberration. But even this was not a 1960s, 1970s thing, this goes back to the turn of the prior century, you know, the focus on reform, not punishment, yadda yadda.

And even then, mind you, the church was going to coddle and protect these men anyway, they just used the mental health field’s much more liberal stance back then to bolster their position.

What I am referring to, is the fact that the church did not simply transfer these people, they referred them for “therapy” and treatment of their “disease” and they had a stable of psychologists and psychiatrists willing to pronounce them “cured” or “no risk” before they reassigned them. And back then, the psychiatrists did not have to call the cops, unlike today.

The 70s were pretty extreme, ya’ll. Playboy ran a pictorial of children, yes, like 10 year olds, accompanied by an article about sexual liberation for children, describing a family with like, you know, no hangups, the kids all doing each other, mom and dad teaching them how, possession of that issue is probably illegal now.

I have had to read too many depositions of priests and bishops.

Lascauxcaveman

How small was my town? I tell ya, my town was so small, we didn’t get a pedophile priest until the 1990’s.

(True story, and as it turns out, and not exactly funny when it did happen.)

GOPCrusher

[re=546122]ManchuCandidate[/re]: Agreed. Those pics of Nazi Pope are just plain creepy.

[re=546128]Scarab[/re]: I blame the 70s for the folk guitar Mass.
[re=546164]Prommie[/re]: A lot of times they lumped the alcoholic priests and the pedophile ones together for treatment. Although they were repeatedly warned that the pedophiles was less likely to be “cured”.

[re=546167]Lascauxcaveman[/re]: If your school-mates had ‘put out’ a bit sooner, a bit more eagerly…

nappyduggs

This round, furry, young mammal exploits the QWERTY keyboard layout like nobody’s business, what with him just pounding away at all hours of the night and morning knowing that the law of ratios will insure him some words out of which to fashion a blog post.

And excuse me for using the phrase “pounding away” in this comment about Ross Douthat. Gross.

Edywin

[re=546167]Lascauxcaveman[/re]: My town was so small we had to BORROW a pedophile priest from a passing pedophile train, and all we got from him was a wet wedgie.

Suds McKenzie

[re=546086]FMA[/re]: [re=546128]Scarab[/re]: I Feel Like You Do.

JMP

[re=546132]wilbro[/re]: It’s the pathology of the anti-sex religious conservatives (which includes the Catholic church, fundamentalist Protestants and Muslims, and orthodox Jews), and their conceptions of “sin”. To them, in general any sex outside of the narrow approved form is inherently sinful, and what’s wrong is the sex itself, not any harm caused.

Therefore, to fundamentalists consenting unmarried adults having sex, which includes all gay sex, and even marital oral or anal sex, and sometimes use of birth control, is just as bad as rape; and so rape is forgivable, since they don’t care about the victims, just the sex act.

[re=546154]Bearbloke[/re]: Shouldn’t that just be list of popes?

charlesdegoal

What I find truly revealing is the line about using common sense rather than psychiatry. What is this relatively young, Harvard educated person afraid of? He wouldn’t suggest using common sense in place of generals to fight a war. The know-nothing argument (we don’t need no economists, just common sense) is generally not his thing. But when it comes to psychiatry, it obviously hits him somewhere in the solar plexus where his guilt and hangups hide. Come on, Ross, let it all hang out, you’ve got nothing to lose by messing up you hair a little.

Edywin

[re=546171]springfield_meltdown[/re]: So what, the kids ended up getting fucked by empty beer and scotch bottles?

Lazy Media

[re=546123]Prommie[/re]: Sounds just like the lame pinko defense of the Soviets in the ’50s and ’60s, that the USSR would have been GREAT if they just hadn’t had those damn free countries around setting a bad, tempting example for the New Socialist Man. If only people weren’t having sex, Catholic priests would have no trouble at all sticking to their vow of chastity. Why does everyone hate Catholic priests?

Well, I’m feeling fine
With my column in the Times
But the Vatican will get me yet
Blame the pedophile priest
On the hippies, at least
We’s all on the cover of Wonkette

S.Luggo

Douie’s final paragraph is hee-hee-larious as he creates, a priori, a dichotomy of (supposed)views between lib and conservo RCs, one which says sexual repression led priests to child-diddling and the other which says it was the permission of Woodstock that allowed priestly love of sweet, sweet young flesh to burst forth (so to speak).

Me, I blame teh global warming and sun spots.

WIDTAP

[re=546094]Lazy Media[/re]: See – you prove Douchhat’s point. If no one talked about it in the fourties, it didn’t actually exist.

Nil ergo propter probus.

imissopus

So the takeaway from all of this is that Ross Douthat is still a horrible writer, irrational thinker, and all-around ginormous douchebag? And I think I’m underselling it a little.

Lazy Media

[re=546139]mumblyjoe[/re]: A lot of these Catholic priest boyfuckers weren’t child molesters. They were raping/seducing teenagers, which is different (still really bad, but not the same as child molestation). Child molesters don’t fuck prepubescent children because they’re frustrated, depressed and horny; they fuck children because they have a fucked-up libido that finds little kids sexy. Usually, you get that from being molested as a child. All the grownup seminary buggery in the world isn’t going to make somebody want to fuck little kids.

Being surrounded by sexual libertinism MIGHT make you more likely to try to suck a 16-year-old’s cock, but it’s a pretty weak argument.

Lazy Media

[re=546164]Prommie[/re]: The Aristocrats!

Lucidamente

To go all serious for a moment: Ross Doudou ought to read Chapter 12 (Conspiracy of Silence) of Garry Wills’s _Papal Sin: Structures of Deceit_ and then have himself a nice big cup of shut the fuck up.

ttommyunger

What the fuck is it with these people; Douthat and that insufferable prig Bill Donahue (it wasn’t pedophilia because “most” of the boys were post-pubescent) going to such extremes to defend the indefensible or explain the inexplicable. I lump them all together in what I call “The Cocksucker Defense”.

Extemporanus

[re=546164]Prommie[/re]: tl;dr

(too liberal; didn’t rape)

gurukalehuru

I think saying this goes back to the 60s or the 50s is extremely shortsighted.
Mark Foley’s defense was that he was molested by a priest. It seems logical to assume (I love that phrase)that he, in turn, was molested by a priest when he was young, and so on and so back through the generations unto the beginning of the Catholic Church, although it certainly didn’t originate there, they undoubtedly stole the idea from some earlier cult, the same as they stole the Christmas trees from the proto-Vikings.

SmutBoffin

Douthat is getting torn to shreds in the comments. Surprisingly, no one wants to defend his scapegoating on the child-rape issue.

Sleeves

“Doubt that, Ross.” How many times was it heard in his formative ears? A dear john doe left dead in the column gutter of his inner life, no ID (imperative direction)…”the scandal implicates left and right” in reality.

I’d rather read the dictionary, catch-up with Wonkette. Hmm…
1781 Hutton Tour to Caves Gloss., Rostled, half rotten as apples sometimes are.
1862 C. C. Robinson Dial. Leeds Gloss. 395 ‘A rossill’d apple.’ Said only of this species of fruit.
-no…no…aha!-
1875 Knight Dict. Mech. 1984/2 A common use of the rosser is in saw-mills,‥to remove the bark from the log in advance of the path of the saw.

gurukalehuru

Thousands of years, but the speed of information now is bringing things to light.
There are worlds within our world, cultures of which we know nothing even though they walk among us.

brown_recluse

[re=546164]Prommie[/re]: I think it also needs to be added that there were therapists as far back as the 1970’s who rejected the idea that pedophiles could be returned to work with children, but that the Church favored therapists who told them what they wanted to hear.

bitchincamaro

[re=546134]Extemporanus[/re]: Dog bless you, young man.

TCmac

I was an alter boy in 60’s, and did all four years of high school at all male catholic school, not to. I was never hit on, but what a fucking freak show. The cool boys having a little communion wine with father after mass, a teacher (Brother wtf) wearing lipstick to class, another teacher having the boys over for a few beers, and the priests and brothers just kind of disappearing. One teacher vanished after a little story in the LA Times about some special movies he was helping to produce. I was fired from the alter in 7th grade by Sister Mary Elephant cause I didn’t seem to fit in, so to speak.

Guppy06

1.) It sounds like all Catholics are retarded/evil. The conservative priests want to rape children, and the “liberal” Catholics say these priests wouldn’t have the urge to stick it into prepubescent boys if they had access to consenting women having reached sexual maturity. Conclusion: all Catholics, of all political stripes, think it’s natural for all men to rape children if they don’t have a woman to stick it in.*

2.) “Sexual permissiveness of the 70’s?” Yeah, I was busy being born in the 70’s, but I’m pretty damned sure that nobody but Roman Polanski thought it was cool to forcibly sodomize children, even back then.

*How to pick up a Catholic girl: “Sleep with me or I’ll be forced to rape children!”

Radiotherapy

I wonder what that vatican’s official position is?

Accordion-o-rama

Priest sexual abuse goes back centuries. We should blame heliocentrism.

doloras

“It sounds like all Catholics are retarded/evil.”

Screw you too. The current Pope, while a reactionary in many ways, is the FIRST POPE EVER to take child-raping priests seriously. John Paul II was completely useless. And now there’s a lynch mob after Ratzi because he did a half-assed job, instead of no job like every one of his predecessors.

mcc

Douthat previously suggested that the child abuse scandal was caused by the Irish.

[re=546229]TCmac[/re]: “I was fired from the alter in 7th grade by Sister Mary Elephant cause I didn’t seem to fit in, so to speak”

Sorry to break it to you Mate, but a new crop of tight young boys came in and you were past your sale-date…

Guppy06

[re=546240]doloras[/re]: The only half-assed job he’s done so far is a half-assed attempt to make sure priests don’t get caught. Relocating priests to be able to work with fresh batches of young boys before the police start to believe the previous victims is not “dealing with the problem,” half-assed or otherwise. That’s called “covering it up.”

What Fresh Hell is This?

If Ross Douthat had testicles, that’s where I would kick him.

My memory is old and fading, and I rarely even read my horoscope in the New York Times, but have the paper’s standards always been THIS low?

Why is it every time I force myself to read Douchehat I come away thinking that this dude has some deeply serious, unresolved issues?

El Pinche

[re=546244]mcc[/re]: Sloooow down Douthat, you need to ease into moranship. You just don’t willy nilly and jump into it right away.
And this guy is supposed to be the King Shit of Fuck Mountain of conservatards??

S.Luggo

[re=546164]Prommie[/re]: “Coddle”?

It has been an essential tenet of the Church (and other Xian, zombie cults) that thru repentance one can receive God’s pardon and achieve salvation. And that the Sacrament of Confession never wears out after “x” number of road miles. Thus a child-porker could always go straight (no pun, etc.) unless he were a Joo or a muzzie. That meant that he was damned to the eternal fires of H-E-double-hockey-sticks any hoo. So who gives a rats ass?

“Liberal”?
Re them permissive ‘liberal’ psychotherapist who allowed priesty visits to the love canal of minors to continue:

Before 1974 the DSM, shrinkdoms Bible of stuff you could treat and consequently bill for, classified gheyness as a mental illness. The 1974 edition changed that to a “Sexual Orientation Disturbance”. It was only in 1986 and much lip-biting and by the gay homosexuals and ‘liberal’ shrinks that “SOD” was dropped from the DSM. Until then, gay-i-tude was viewed (at least by some conservo shrinks) as a “treatable” sickness (like jock itch). The Church latched onto this false hope of treatment.

[re=546258]doloras[/re]: Because when I want impartial and unbiased information about the Roman Catholic Church, I turn to the National Catholic Reporter! Too bad that this came out a week later.

Do you, too, get paid 50 cents for each troll posting?

What Fresh Hell is This?

If you say something bad about the Pope is it considered a “Papal Smear”?

That’s one image I don’t want to carry around with me.

Godot

[re=546230]Guppy06[/re]: You could not be more wrong. It’s not that priests become pedophiles because they can’t have sex. It’s that requiring vows of celibacy slants the applicant pool towards those with unhealthy sexual appetites. Allowing priests to have sex would, at least in theory, make the priesthood more attractive to normal people.

I’ve always believed that pedophile priests were so common not because anything about the priesthood made them pedophiles, but because the priesthood was an attractive option for those who were already predisposed to pedophilia. They believed that devoting themselves to religion, taking a vow of chastity, and living among others who had done likewise would make in easier to deny their sexual urges that they knew to be inappropriate. Or, more cynically, they knew that the priesthood would be a relatively safe haven from which to satisfy their urges. Whereas most people with more normal and healthy sexual attitudes, even if “into” religion, would frequently be turned off by vows of celibacy.

Make sense now, you awful bigot?

assistant/atlas

I would say that I wish Ross Douthat would be gangraped by group of fat, hairy 70-something priests, but it’s fairly obvious at this point that that would be a great experience for him.

God, what an embarrassment. No wonder no one reads NYT anymore, except when it’s linked on Wonkette or elsewhere.

Jukesgrrl

[re=546281]Krasdale[/re]: You should make RevMcBonerforboys march in the online tax revolt march (make sure you type it all as one word — it only prints a first name). Or did Katydid and I kill that thing on Sunday night?

[re=546270]JooJoo Bee[/re]: I read a recipe for bread today that told me to add “flower.”

Anonymous Office Zombie

The permissive sexual culture that prevailed everywhere, seminaries included, during the silly season of the ’70s deserves a share of the blame, as does that era’s overemphasis on therapy.

Yes, yes, young squire Douchetwat with his unoriginal tropes about everything being the fault of the counter culture generation that he stole right out of the playbook of Conservatard Saint Irving Kristol and his ilk. One can always count on each generation on the Right to be unoriginal with their fallacies.

Again and again, bishops relied on psychiatrists rather than common sense in deciding how to handle abusive clerics.

Psychiatry as opposed to “common sense” ways to handle abusive clerics? What, like take them out back and have the congretation shoot them? Actually… that sounds like a pretty good solution to me. Count me in for this whole common sense approach.

Lascauxcaveman

[re=546279]Godot[/re]: Your summation of the problem is balanced, fair minded and most likely based in fact. In other words, it’s an insult to this forum.

You could have at least tossed in a penis joke, or something.

Guppy06

[re=546279]Godot[/re]:

“Allowing priests to have sex would, at least in theory, make the priesthood more attractive to normal people.”

That would only reduce the percentage of pedophile priests, not actually reduce the number of such priests. For them, “not getting caught” is only a secondary goal compared to “rape children,” and they will always gravitate to positions that put them into close contact with children, whether it be medicine, education, or religion. But the first two have formalized procedures to protect children and ostracize abusers, while the Roman Catholic Church instead has formalized procedures to protect the Church and ostracize accusers.

Allowing priests to marry is tertiary at best to actually keeping pedophiles out of the priesthood and removing them if they do manage to get in. All it would really do is cover up the problem by diluting it, even if you do assume that it’s impossible for pedophiles to be married.

Non-pedophile celibate priests, ones for whom their spiritual calling was strong enough even to overcome reservations over celibacy, apparently still don’t have the strength of character to properly deal with their abusing peers. How will letting candidates marry suddenly improve their caliber?

“They believed that devoting themselves to religion, taking a vow of chastity, and living among others who had done likewise would make in easier to deny their sexual urges that they knew to be inappropriate.”

The whole point to pedophilia is that they don’t recognize such urges as inappropriate. Someone who actually recognized those urges as wrong would work to avoid children, not actively seek them out.

“Make sense now, you awful bigot?”

Nope. You’re still assuming that active heterosexuality and pedophilia are on opposite ends of the same spectrum, that the presence of one will make the other go away, whether individually or culturally. You’re basically saying that Douthat was right: a culture that eschews heterosexuality can only result in pedophilia.

sati demise

We all know the ‘conservatives’ are FOR personal responsibility
until it comes to blaming anything, anything at all, on the hippies.

Then it is always the hippies fault.

Long Form Def Certificate

In Ross’s defense, the church outside North America — by which I mean, the U.S. — attempted to treat priestly sexual abuse as intrinsic to an American Catholicism ripe with the fruits of free love & other libertinisms common in the U.S. post-war (from the Beats, onward). In that way, the various Catholic areas worldwide owed nothing to the victims. Let the U.S. handle it, they said.

Turned out, it’s been taking on all over. Since before the permissive 60s. But, no, nobody has been taking responsibility for it. The Euros & Africans got one thing right, then.

wolfcatcher

“I don’t think that we should blame the priests either, I think the ones we need to blame are all those sexy-ass little boys for looking so damn hot . . . .”

–Some NYC comic named Dov Davidoff

RPolanski

I put the blame on all those altar boys and other young male Catholics. They were “asking for it” by the way they dressed. You know, pants, shoes, shirts. “Asking for it” I tell ya.

RPolanski

[re=546230]Guppy06[/re]: You talkin’ about me?

TCmac

Actually we alter boys wore black and white dresses, like nuns, come to think of it, and now that I am thinking of it I really need that drink of sacramental wine. Jeebus please wash my brain.

bitchincamaro

[re=546270]JooJoo Bee[/re]: Take it easy on [re=546229]TCmac[/re]. His spelling indicates the proper use of the root “alter”, as in, “other”. To wit: “I was an[other] boy in the 60’s, and [was]did [on] all four[s]…I was never hit…”, etc., etc. True confessions merit true forgiveness.

schvitzatura

If Goth/Vandal Arian elites had crushed the nasty, radical lumpenprole Tridentine heretics early on (like should have happened), Ross, we’d all be Gnostic Universalist Deists.

And probably wouldn’t have this all-male club Roman clergy…the Christian Vatican (if any) would have been in the Sudetenland.

TCmac

So very embarrassing to be taken down on this website, I should observe and not post, am way out of my league. However, thanks for the correction, bitch, you are forgiven.

Beck Licks Seer Stones

If you refused to give people condoms, resulting in certain deaths and young supple boys with AIDS, would YOU rape them?! The nuns are disease-free they never had sex! You guys are morans.

Aflac Shrugged

(Again and again, bishops relied on psychiatrists rather than common sense in deciding how to handle abusive clerics.)

Common sense says: you allow your priests to marry and bust a theologically permissible nut into the adult male or female to whom they are married. Unfortunately for all of us, God’s foreknowledge and omnipotence apparently don’t extend to removing all traces of human sexual impulse from those individuals whom He knows as future priests. Or child molesters, for that matter.

bitchincamaro

[re=546331]TCmac[/re]: Don’t you dare leave us. Not until we say so. Look into our third eye, and repeat: “Alterboys don’t quit; they endure.” Jesus Krist. I was only a choir boy, and sometimes I spell it, “chore boy”. xoxo

And don’t forget why Gob put that “Reply” button there.

-bc

Veritas78

I blame their marketing department. To become a priest, you go to a semenary? Join the Navy and become a semen? Jizzus H. Christ.

[re=546347]Aflac Shrugged[/re]: No joking, I think the real problem is that the clergy is a perfect place for freaks to hide. Nobody asks why you’re not married. Nobody asks why you’re “tutoring” altar boys late into the night. If you have no desire to get married, because you spend your days and nights dreaming of cornholing seven year old boys, it’s a great place to be.

Oldskool

[re=546306]TCmac[/re]: Altar wine was best if hidden in a cool place and used the same night staggering around the neighborhood visting girls from 8th grade. Altar-boying wasn’t entirely bad.

hotdog

Mr. Ratzinger should do the Christ-like thing and offer himself up to be crucified. The day after tomorrow, Good Friday, would be perfect timing.

sati demise

[re=546386]hotdog[/re]: oh yea……perfecto!

TCmac

[re=546375]bitchincamaro[/re]: Good gob man/woman!, don’t you work for a living? This avatar boy is a quitter after a certain hour, and a certain amount of alcohol. Thanks for your kindness.

AnnieGetYourFun

[re=546134]Extemporanus[/re]: You are fucking awesome.

Zorg

The investigation of the Boston archdiocese beginning in the late 1970s uncovered priestly pedophilia cases going back into the 1940s. And, there is the Strange Case of Pius IX and the Kidnapped Jewish Boy, Edgardo Mortara, dating to 1858, but I guess Ross wasn’t reading the NY Times back then. Pius IX is the one who declared the doctrine of Papal infallibility at the Lateran Council in 1867, by the way. Guess he had something to be above criticism about by then…

Cranky Little Camperette

Aw, hell, let’s go all twelfth-century on this. The Church has always maintained its independence to “take care of” its errant priests as it saw fit, refusing to submit to secular justice (which is pretty much why Henry II allegedly bumped off Thomas a Becket — didn’t work).

The Church should have just turned over the pedophiles to the local constabulary (or possibly an angry, pitchfork-wielding mob) rather than claiming the primacy of the Church over the state and enacting outdated, ineffective and downright harmful BS policies.

S.Luggo

[re=546296]Guppy06[/re]:
That [allowing married priests] would only reduce the percentage of pedophile priests, not actually reduce the number of such priests.”
Anti-Doucey?

So why don’t the Protty denominations or persons of the Jewishness persuasion in re their male clergy incur the same incidence of man-boy-humpimg scandals?

Honest to the greenback Amero, the use of sociological and anthropology studies to verify theory has gone down the shit tubes in this country. All that we rely on today is unsubstantiated opinion. [I know. So, so borrrrrring. Proof thus demonstrated.]

Blender

If the Catholic Church ever decrees that priests can fuck altar girls in their mid-twenties to mid-thirties (preferably on a nice, sandy white beach in Fiji), I’m gonna be a priest. Hallelujah (do Catholics say that?)!

Sparky McGruff

[re=546434]S.Luggo[/re]: Hey, unsubstantiated opinion is the currency of our times.

S.Luggo

[re=546432]Cranky Little Camperette[/re]:
“The Church should have just turned over the pedophiles to the local constabulary …”

That would have violated the medieval concept (a progenitor of our First Amemdment) of separation of church and state. [Not snark.] Standing up for that concept got Thomas a Becket, the Archbishop of Canterbury, all stabby stabbed to death (ouch, ouch, dammit Cartman) by Henry the Second.

Hank wanted direct control of the clergy (and Church lands) thru the reach of his courts, thus side-stepping the bishops.

Yeah. Right. Like I caught your attention. Those who forget the lessons of history, forget.

ElRat

Is it me or is pope creepy [from the pic] shaving his eyebrows like a Latina? The only creatures in Ire safe from those sick fucks ass raping & abuse seem to be the cattle … maybe.

Sparky McGruff

[re=546444]S.Luggo[/re]: It would also violate the principles of “Father McFeeleyboys is just that way. Let’s send him to a new place so he has a new crop of young’ns to choose from”. Because if they had any self respect, they’d throw the boy diddlers out of the clergy as soon as it became clear, and not actively cover up their crimes.

LordBuckley

Douchehat also totally ignores the fact that systemic child rape has been a standard of the Catholic church for much longer than the last 30 years. Ask my grandfather and my great-uncle. But back then, you didn’t fucking talk about it, it was just lousy hippies in the 1970s who advanced the idea it was acceptable to tell someone when your priest had brutally raped you.

AnnieGetYourFun

[re=546435]Blender[/re]: We used to sing a catchy Protestant song called “Amen” in my Catholic Church. You pretty much just sing “Amen” and top it off with an “Hallelujah!”. One time, my uncle attended church with the fam for the first time in 30 years, and fell asleep (of course) and woke with a jump when we started singing “Amen” because he was pretty sure that he had sleepwalked into the wrong church.

So, to answer your question: some Catholics do say it, but rarely, and they scare people when they do.

Prommie

[re=546434]S.Luggo[/re]: 90% plus of even educated people are too ignorant of the principles of statistical analysis to understand that sociology is in fact a science and relies on subjective observations and produces accurate predictions. Going with the adage “there are lies, damn lies, and statistics,” they assume, “I don’t understand it, therefore it must be bullshit.”

What amazes me is so much serious policy, so much legislation, is based on “common sense” hunches and guesses and cliches and canards about human behavior, even on subjects where science exists which proves the “common sense” wrong.

Things like the laffer curve, the deterrent effect of the death penalty and long sentences, welfare causing poverty, sex ed and condom distribution causing an increase in sexual activity, the list is endless.

Cranky Little Camperette

[re=546444]S.Luggo[/re]: Henry II was much more interested in bringing a rich and powerful institution under royal control, in which case, the separation of Church and state is essential. By clinging to and applying that same medieval concept to the pedophile priests, the Church has done more harm than good. They obviously failed in their efforts to “cure” pedophile priests. If they had followed re=546487]Sparky McGruff[/re]’s advice and tossed them out of the Church (and, therefore, out from under the Church’s protection) pedophile priests would then be subject to civil authorities.

Rather than admitting that some priests are bad and should be neither in the Church, nor around small children, they kept the problem “in the family” and covered up the situation. Had they set the precedent of “you screw up, we’re gonna toss you out into the secular world and you’re on your own, pal,” this might have discouraged men who thought the priesthood to be a “cure” for their pedophilia. Celibacy and prayer, thought to combat and cure such problems, is not always enough.

Cranky Little Camperette

[re=546577]Cranky Little Camperette[/re]: Gah! Reference FAIL.

andmeilikethesauce

@rebellitor. Douchehat has a job because he wrote a book about how you don’t have to do shit to graduate from Harvard, so to reward him for not having to think very hard to get his gilt-edged resume, the Times allows him to not think very hard at one of the plum jobs in the world. Ross, tell me, how can I fail up too?

I guess it is conforting to know our newspaper of record is being written by a flabby fucktard who’s too lazy to actually make sure catholic priests weren’t child rapers BEFORE the 1970’s. OH and I’d totally nail chunky reese witherspoon, also.